Not So Cuil After All
Cuil was finally ready for its big debut. The Press had picked up the story. Digg was awash with stories of how it would kill Google.
So, I decided to check it out and I have to say I am disappointed. I’m cool with their Gaelic spelling of “cool,” but there are two significant problems with their service as currently released.
First, their results are not very good. I decided to look up a WordPress plugin I wrote with the reasonably unique name TTFTitles. In general, if a page mentions “ttftitles” it is talking about this plugin. So, what results did I get? A bunch of blogs mentioning that they are using it. Come on, even Yahoo finds the home page for the plugin as the first result.
Results for other searches were equally unimpressive for anything other than very general queries. It seems that relevancy drops as query detail increases. A search for “seo” returns some relevant results, but if I try to find out about the new ride at Kennywood this year gives me links to a grade school in West Virginia, some newspaper articles, a couple of blog posts, and a couple of forum threads. These are all related to what I was looking for, but completely miss the page I was looking for. In an era when the average search query has finally reached three words (can’t find the reference right now), they seem to have optimized for the wrong queries.
A second problem with Cuil is this:
I haven’t seen a search engine do this in almost a decade. If you are going to go after Google, the very least you can do is stress test your service. Under stress, they could dial down their “relevancy” (I doubt we’d notice any difference). They could use some caching for the top million queries. There are a lot of things they could do, and I’m sure they did a number of them, but they result is that this debutante has come to her coming out party with toilet paper stuck to her shoe.
In 100% agreement. They were getting some free publicity on NPR news this morning, but when I tried a few searches, I quickly came to the conclusion that they’re not really ready to launch. When I click on the “About Cuil” link on their Google-inspired Home page (except with a black background…how Cuil!), I received this error:
“Oops! We couldn’t find that page. Please verify that the URL is correct and try again.”
Hmmm…oops.
DT
I’ll second this. Cuil returned so many junk/spam search results before it actually got to content, where yahoo/google/MSN all returned relevant results.
It looks like Cuil is indexing all the crap Google won’t, just to say “We have more pages than google”
WTF?
http://farm4.static.flickr.com/3164/2710730454_f53717279b_o.png
I thought I just had accidentally re-read the last sentence of the second paragraph….
Give it time, Rome wasn’t built overnight.
Agreed; the results stink. I’d think that that’s job one if you’re launching a search engine.
@nate: fixed. thanks. sorry about that. darn ctrl-v.
i took their advise and tried a different word, but ‘toads’ gives the same result…
Comment by Jake
Made Monday, 28 of July , 2008 at 11:15 am
WTF?
http://farm4.static.flickr.com/3164/2710730454_f53717279b_o.png
clusty.com is quite cool. (And the suggestions are often useful.)
@jake: maybe you should try something that’s not quite so esoteric…
they very least you can do is stress test your service.
Should be “the very least…”
Anyway, I saw the NYT article and tried Cuil for a few grant writing-relating searches and came up with crap. I tried searching for my name; Google comes up with my book blog, Cuil comes up with a bunch of crap. I tried searching for an RFP and didn’t find it on the first page. If that weren’t enough, I find the two or three column structure busy and distracting.
Margaret Boteler: Give it time, Rome wasn’t built overnight.
From James Wood’s How Fiction Works:
@Jake,
As they suggest, try to think of different words to describe your search. “jumping amphibians” gets THOUSANDS of results!!
I agree. I tried searching for my software programs; my own software website wasn’t even listed on the first five pages. I tried searching for my software company name; nothing!
Not so hot IMO, unless they’re trying to do something else…
I couldn’t agree more. I get so used to Google being able to at least weed the spam out of the first page of results for what I consider common search terms that it’s a bit surprising when something being hyped as much as Cuil fails at that task. A simple search for a popular sports team gave me one good result in the top left position, and the rest were all spam results — most were for ticket sales. From what I saw, it looks like massive keyword stuffing will work well with Cuil — something Google fixed several years ago. Were these Cuil guys high up in Google when they left, or were they the guys who made the coffee in the morning and then got fired when they were found wasted and passed out in the parking lot?
I searched for the big Internet meme of 2007, “2 girls 1 cup”. It returned absolutely no results. Pathetic. Next!
I agree; irrelevant results abound!
Also, the adjacent photographs apparently are not necessarily associated with the content; some are simply ads, based on the blip displayed under the URL.
Many of the links I clicked did not properly resolve.
And, finally, the primary, expected URL for some common search item was buried on a subsequent page. Example: Search: cuil. Their own home page does not even come up first.
What would really be useful is a search engine that permitted exclusion in the query.
not to mention that some very simple searches return no results, even if cuil has made a suggestion. or, at least, that’s what happened this morning, before cuil became overwhelmed by all of the attention and needed to take a “time out.”
Really stinks! Not only will Cuil not give Google a run for it’s money, Cuil is not even a decent search engine. Don’t waste your time.
I plugged in the name of my new online publication Sustainable Farmer – zip. They suggested I might be misspelling the keywords.
I launched the publication three weeks ago and used PR Web to promote it. Google already had a ton of links for it.
Definitely not ready for prime time. Now or ever, I suspect.
The difference I’ve found with Cuil and Google is that when searching for very specific things in Google I tend to skip the first 10 or so pages of results because mostly it’s people trying to sell said specific item and not actually inform. With Cuil at least I ahve found a few things quickly (in teh first 10 pages) that Google pointed out about 30 pages in.
Yeah, its not so great at this point in time…
I searched for Los Angeles, no results. I searched for San Diego, no results. I searched for Las Vegas, got results and got confused by the layout. Then the site went down for me without even an error message. No more results.
cuil is garbage. sure it might get better in time. but the point of me checking it out today was because of all the hype they’re generating saying that they’re a google killer, when they’re not even a msn live search killer. have fun competiting with webcrawler and altavista cuil. maybe i’ll check you out in six months, but after this very bad first impression, i doubt it.
Search for:
Letty’s Restaurant Tornado (a restaurant that was destroyed in AR by tornado this year)
Google: 7,700 results, with mostly relevant hits on the first page.
Cuil: ZERO results
Rex Ipso Loquitor “The Thing Speaks for Itself”
They should have done a lot more work before blowing their big prime-time media chance. If this was really all it was hyped to be today, Google could have lost a fair amount of market share overnight.
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When I searched for my name, the cuil claims to have found 60 results. The first page list 12 of them and the second page lists 3 more. What happened to the remaining 45 ?
@Annie Mouse
Hmmmm…you seem to be the one and only person that has “anything” positive to say about Cuil. As a matter of fact, 100% of the opinions voiced in here so far, are exactly the opposite of yours. What are you doing differently (from the rest of us) to get better results from this search engine?
Just curious…
If you get “no results” for a search on cuil, disable “safe search”.
Seriously. It appears cuil considers most of the internet is not safe for anyone.
In this way, it is truly before its time.
Notice how it uses the same graphics over and over on the site links and the graphics have nothing to do with the sites.
Do a search then go through the pages…the same graphics pop up in random sites that do not have the graphics on the website.
Glad I’m not the only one who was disappointed. A search for a keyword, has what I’m looking for on the first page of every major search engine out there. With cuil, it’s not even listed. Very lame.